The Australia based Journal of Bioethical Inquiry has recently published two papers[1],[2]
by the same group of authors. One of these papers was a Letter to the Editor,
hence it is not entirely clear whether or not it was peer reviewed. Let’s call
this paper Paper One. It was
published in 2013. Another paper was published in 2015, the journal mentions
that this paper was externally peer reviewed. Let’s call this paper Paper Two. Each of these papers targets
editorial and commercial practices of major English language bioethics journals
or their publishers. Both papers are Open Access at the time of writing, I
encourage you to take the time to read them for context.
This blog entry responds to both papers. My primary objective is to show that each paper fails
in each mission.
Let us start with Paper One. The authors aimed here to
investigate whether bioethics journals are variously ‘institutionally racist’
or ‘editorially biased’. They tried to achieve this by using the following
method. They investigated the composition of major journals’ Editorial Boards –
no content analysis was undertaken as part of this research project. The
authors of this paper then grouped Editorial Board members into various categories
according to where they live in terms of their countries’ rankings in the Human
Development Index. Surprisingly – and
evidently unjustifiably so - this paper then proceeded to grouping the
Editorial Board members into three categories (the HDI offers four[3]).
It grouped Editorial Board members into Very High and High HDI, Medium HDI and
Low HDI. The paper then notes indignantly that the vast majority of Editorial
Board members belong into the first group of HDI countries. It turns out, by
grouping Very High and High HDI countries into one category, these authors
created arguably artificially the result required for their scathing critique.
Unsurprisingly they found that the vast majority of Editorial Board member hail
from countries that are either Very High or High HDI. However, a closer look
into these categories reveals that the following countries can be found in their
amalgamated first category: Germany and Libya, Mexico and Switzerland, Iran and
the United States, Sri Lanka and Liechtenstein, and so on and so forth. Quite
clearly, many countries belonging to the global south were unjustifiably folded
into the global north category to achieve the desired outcome, namely
blameworthy bioethics journals having an insufficient number of Editorial Board
members hailing from the global south.
As mentioned already, Paper One also failed to undertake an
actual content analysis. Bioethics established some 15 years ago its own
specialised developing world focused companion journal called Developing World Bioethics. In case you
wonder whether that meant shunting articles aside into a global south niche
category, nothing could be further from the truth. Developing
World Bioethics has currently the second highest Impact Factor of bona fide
bioethics journals, as measured by the Institute for Scientific Information.
All of this escaped the authors of this paper, because they were primarily
concerned with the composition of the Editorial Board of Developing World Bioethics, an Editorial Board they happily
castigated for having insufficient representation from the global south,
because by these authors’ definition, for instance the journal's Mexican and Sri Lankan
Editorial Board members don’t quite count as representatives of countries of
the global south.
Paper Two proceeds in this methodological vein. The focus is
on purportedly greedy publishers and general bioethical imperialism. Like in
the first paper, hyperbole remains a strong selling point of these authors. The
target this time are paywalls. Most journals in our field are subscription
based journals, which is partly a function of the fact that most authors
publishing in bioethics journals do not have access to the funds required to
publish in pay-for-play Open Access journals. That also means that access to
the content we publish is restricted to subscribers, typically subscribing
university libraries. Individual articles are available for sale to people
interested in purchasing them. Paper Two then proceeds to investigate the
question of whether mainstream or leading bioethics journals are available to
academics working in the global south. This actually is an important issue and
as an Editor of Bioethics and Developing World Bioethics I have always
cared passionately about affordable or complimentary access for academics
working in the global south. Leading academic publishers, including Wiley-Blackwell,
the publisher of Bioethics, are founding members of myriad access schemes
aimed at ensuring that academics in the global south have access to the content
we publish. Knowledge is power after all. Among these schemes is HINARI, a
scheme administered by the World Health Organisation. There are other schemes,
AGORA and OARE among them.
The authors
of Paper Two apparently investigated whether leading English language bioethics
journals are available via HINARI. That is a fair enough approach, HINARI
covers health related research outputs, so Bioethics
and Developing World Bioethics should
be available thru HINARI, if at all. Paper Two reports erroneously that neither
Bioethics nor Developing World Bioethics are available via HINARI. The authors make the
same erroneous claim about other major journals in the field, including but not
limited to ajob – American Journal of Bioethics,
jme – Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Clinical
Ethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Journal of Law, Medicine and
Ethics, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry.
It is worth noting here that the authors of Paper Two did
not bother confirming with me or my fellow editors, or with our publishers,
whether these journals are really not
made available free of charge or at very low cost to academic institutions in LMIC
countries. Apparently, confirming with the editors of these journals, or their
publishers, that these bioethics journals really
are not available free of charge to authors in the global south was too onerous
for the campaigning authors of Paper Two.
It turns out, not only are Bioethics
and Developing World Bioethics
available via HINARI, but so are our esteemed competitors, namely all of the journals I mentioned above.[4]
There is some irony in the fact that the current Editors of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry were
unaware of the availability of their very own journal via HINARI. It is
doubtful that they meant to stand idle by while authors slander their journal
in the pages of their own publication.
In light of these facts, I strongly encourage you to read
Paper Two again. The anti-imperialist emperors look pretty naked to me. It’s a
good example for the view that good intentions are not good enough. This
research output reportedly underwent peer review, which goes to show that while
peer review might be the best quality control mechanism there is, it is far
from perfect. Paper Two goes on at great length about the purported profit
motives of greedy publishers and how that impacts access to scientific
information for researchers in the global south, alas its starting premise
turns out to be false.
One would hope the Editors of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry retract this particular peer reviewed
output at their earliest possible convenience.
UDO SCHUKLENK
[1] Bioethics and
Its Gatekeepers: Does Institutional Racism Exist in Leading Bioethics Journals?
Journal of Bioethical Inquiry DOI:
10.1007/s11673-012-9424-5 [Paper One]
[2] Subrata
Chattopadhyay, Catherine
Myser, and Raymond
De Vries. 2015. Imperialism in Bioethics: How Policies of Profit Negate
Engagement of Developing World Bioethicists and Undermine Global Bioethics. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry DOI: 10.1007/s11673-015-9654-4
[Paper Two]
[4] A complete list
of accessible journals can be found here, http://extranet.who.int/hinari/en/journalList_print.php?all=true
. [Accessed August 11, 2015] Consider saving the large file as a CSV file
(follow the link offering that option). You will then download a MS Excel file
that can easily be searched for journal titles that you are interested in.
